Carla was all he had. There had been Ben, of course, for that short, glorious interlude, that three years and forty-seven days of joy, but now, there was just Carla. Carla, and his work.
Fifteen years ago, when Ben died, Theo had been deep into his third novel. He abandoned it without much thought; he simply couldn’t bear to read words he’d written while Ben played on the lawn outside, or sang with his mother in the kitchen. For a year or two, he couldn’t write at all, he barely even tried, and then when he did try, nothing came. For months and months, for years, nothing came. How to write when his heart hadn’t been broken but removed from his body? What to write? Anything, his agent told him. It doesn’t matter. Write anything. So he did. He wrote a story about a man who loses his child but saves his wife. He wrote a story about a man who loses his wife but saves his child. He wrote a story about a man who murders his sister-in-law. It was awful, all of it. It’s like pulling teeth, he told his agent. Worse than that. It’s like pulling fingernails. With his heart gone, everything he did was worthless, sterile, inconsequential. What if, he asked his agent as he sat, terrified, in front of a blank screen, I cannot work any longer because the man who wrote books is gone?
All the while, Carla slipped away from him. She was there but not there, a wraith in the house, slipping out of rooms when he entered them, closing her eyes when he crossed her field of vision. She went to yoga classes and returned not at all Zen-like but unsettled, angry, crashing through the house and out into the garden, where she would sit, scratching at the skin on her forearms until it bled. His attempts to reach out to her were clumsy, he saw later, ill-judged. The idea they should try for another baby was met with cold fury.
Theo began to spend less and less time at home. He traveled to writers’ festivals, he gave lectures at far-flung universities. He had a brief and unsatisfying affair with his much younger publicist. Finally, Carla left him, although her desertion lacked conviction. She bought a house five minutes’ walk away.
Theo tried nonfiction; he tried to write about the low value assigned to fatherhood, he questioned the truths of female liberation, he pondered a return to more traditional （sexist） values. He hated himself. And he could not begin to find the words for the scope of his loss, the depth of his anger.
Without his son, his wife, his work, Theo became desperate.
* * *
After the police had left, Theo went out for a walk. It was his habit to take a quick turn around the neighborhood about this time, just before lunch, to prevent himself from eating too early. He had a tendency toward gluttony. In the hallway, he reached for his coat and, instinctively, for the dog’s lead, only to withdraw his empty hand. The odd thing wasn’t that he reached for it—he still did that every other day; he wasn’t yet used to Dixon’s absence. No, the odd thing was that Dixon’s lead wasn’t there. He looked about but couldn’t see it anywhere. The cleaner must have moved it, he thought, though he couldn’t for a second think why.
Usually he’d head along the towpath, but given that it was still cordoned off by the police, he headed up over the bridge on Danbury Street instead. There was a man in uniform there too—a young man with a shaving rash, who grinned when he saw Theo, raising his hand in greeting before self-consciously pulling it away.
Theo saw an opening.
“Still searching, are you?” he said, walking off to talk to the young man. “Looking for clues?”
The officer’s face flushed. “Uh . . . yes, well. Looking for a weapon, actually.”
“Of course,” Theo said. “Of course. The weapon. Well . . . ,” he said, looking up and down the canal as though he might spot the knife from up there, “best let you get on with it. Good luck!”
“And to you, too!” the man said, and he blushed furiously.
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh, it’s just . . . your writing and that. Sorry. I—”
“No, that’s quite all right.”
“I’m a fan, that’s all. Yeah. I’m a big fan of The One Who Got Away. I thought it was so interesting, the way you turned the whole thing around, you know, telling the story backward in some parts and forward in others, letting us see inside the killer’s head—that was so brilliant! At first you, like, you don’t know what’s going on, but then it’s just like . . . whoa. So cool. I loved the way you turned everything on its head, playing with our sympathies and empathies and all that business.”
“Really?” Theo laughed, faking incredulity. “I thought everybody thought that was a terrible idea!”